Lenovo boss says Apple missing a trick in China

"We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper"

Shares

The founder of Lenovo has said that Apple is missing huge opportunities in the Chinese market, because it doesn't understand what consumers in China want.

Liu Chuanzhi, Chairman and Founder of Chinese computing giant Lenovo, told the Financial Times that if Apple were to focus on China to the same extent Lenovo did then he would consider them as serious competition in the fast-expanding market.

Steve Jobs' bad temper

As it is, Chuanzhi told the FT: "We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn't care about China.

"If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble."

Lenovo currently has around a 30 per cent share of the rapidly growing Chinese market and at the current rates of growth should become the biggest computing company in the world within the next 12 months.

Apple already has a flagship Apple Store in Beijing and opens a second store in Shanghai this month, but beyond that, opportunities to sell its products across mainland China are still very limited.

iPhone sales have also been hampered in China by previous requirements to disable the Wi-Fi function on the phones, although the new iPhone 4 is now allowed to be sold in China with WiFi.

Lenovo's LePhone was launched earlier this year, designed especially for the needs of Chinese consumers. The Lenovo boss describes the LePhone as "a very practical thing" compared to the Apple iPhone.

"The iPhone has more than 100,000 content providers, and we have no more than 1,000. But our Chinese customers feel our applications are very convenient to use."